From its peak in 2013, the number of long-term GSA-leased properties declined steadily for four years before stabilizing. But only in the past year has that portion of the property inventory started to recover. This trend…
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GSA’s Progress Toward Long-Term Leasing
GSA’s effort toward execution of long-term leases has been a popular topic among investors. Going back to the earliest days of this blog, we observed that the remaining term of GSA leases was dwindling. When GSA…
Cutting Leasing Expenses in a Time of COVID
“With COVID–19, basically, each home has become an enterprise.” So says Mark Pringle, senior vice president in charge of corporate real estate and global facilities at Dell Technologies and one of three outside authorities called on…
U.S. Office Absorption Turns Negative for the First Time in 10 Years
In the category of not-unexpected-but-still-bad-news, Colliers issued its Q2 2020 Office Market Outlook last week reporting that U.S. office absorption turned negative for the first time in a decade. National office demand was negative 13.6 million…
A GSA Audit Faults Its Public Buildings Service for Rampant Lease Extensions
The Public Buildings Service (PBS) is the largest public real estate organization in the United States, under whose aegis more than 1.2 million federal employees are provided with workspaces. The agency, a branch of the federal…
The Specter of Deflation and What it Means for GSA Lessors
One well-known quirk of GSA leases is that operating cost reimbursements are not based on increases in actual costs. Rather, they are calculated on the increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and…
Can We Expect the Government Sector to Outperform? Lessons from the Last Fiscal Crisis
Kevin Warsh, a Federal Reserve governor during the Great Recession, noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this year, “If you’ve seen one financial crisis, you’ve seen one financial crisis.” That is to say, all…
A New GAO Report Questions GSA Savings Claims
The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) leases private property at a cost of billions of dollars—$5.7 billion annually, to be precise, spread out over more than 8,000 leases. Every year, the agency claims, it saves taxpayers…
Child Care Centers and Security Vulnerabilities
The title of a new report by the US General Services Administration (GSA), issued on January 30, 2020, speaks volumes: “Child Care Centers in GSA-Controlled Buildings Have Significant Security Vulnerabilities.” The 30-page report that follows, drawing…
The Public Buildings Reform Board Eyes Federal Properties to Sell
On December 27, 2019, the five-person Public Buildings Reform Board (PBRB) presented a report to the Office of Management and Budget that identifies a dozen federal properties that, it urges, should be sold. Guided by the…